Читать книгу Godblog - Laurie Channer - Страница 8

Two days later, in the middle of the morning rush, Dag, on cash, nudged Heathen, who was plating pastries. He indicated a woman in the lineup. “I’ll bet she doesn’t remember me,” he said. “This’ll be fun.” On her turn, he took her order, then said, “Wait a sec. I’ve got your favourite cup set aside.” Both Heathen and the woman goggled as he made a show of leaving the cash to retrieve it from the high shelf before passing it on to Mohammed at the bar.

By the time Mohammed handed it over, full, the customer was grinning like a kid, taking her special cup, with her coworkers looking on in amazement.

Within a week, Heathen was once again utterly irritated and reluctantly impressed at the same time. The whole damn group was eating out of his hand, and now he had a shelf of five identical “favourite” BlackArts cups put aside for the lot of them. The travel mugs were pushed to the dusty back recesses of the shelf. Dag, for his part, insisted to Heathen and the customers that he knew which of the clone cups “belonged” to each of the women and never, ever mixed them up. He too, seemed pretty impressed with what had escalated out of one day’s idle amusement.

Heathen, who was out for a few days training and competing, heard the rest from other baristas who were on with him the rest of the week. The woman, now introduced as Bonita, had some fun with him, too. At the start of the next work week, she showed up in line again. “That’s not my favourite cup,” she said when Dag passed over her latte. It was “no, no, no,” as Dag hastily cycled through the five special cups. “This is my favourite,” she said and pulled a yellow stoneware mug out of her purse.

“Right on!” Dag said, poured her latte into it and added an extra dollop of foam for putting one over on him.

So there was one yellow mug on the shelf along with the identical white BlackArts cups. Heathen didn’t have a shift until the end of the week, by which time the rest of the bunch had brought their own mugs in, and there was this shelf, now, of people’s own favourite mugs to use when they came to BlackArts, and the women were chorusing, “Hi, Dag!” at the first sight of him.

“Jesus, Dag,” Heathen said without a trace of irony and with more than a hint of awe, the first time she saw it, “you’ve become a god to them.”

• • •

The Hero of the Teeming Masses asks, what would it take for a battle with a terminal disease not to be labelled “courageous”? Well? If you whine and complain all the way? If you go down saying “Damn, I wish my bratty kids had got this instead of me?” Just once, the Hero wants to read an obituary that says, “She died after a cowardly battle with MS.”

Seriously.

• • •

It was one of the rare occasions when all the baristas were there at once: Tim, Maria, KateLynn, Derek, Ashley, Ginette and Dag. Heathen bounded in, late for Mohammed’s staff meeting. “Check it out!” she crowed. “I’m famous!” She dropped a magazine into the middle of the table on which Mohammed had spread the new product cards, nearly sending them to the floor. She picked it up again and showed it around.

From behind the counter, Mohammed caught the title, Canadian Freestyler, a glossy magazine. “Aw, shit,” he heard quietly behind him. He looked over his shoulder. Dag turned quickly back to the beans he was grinding from the new Rwandan blend the staff were all here to try.

Mohammed turned back to Heathen’s wonderful news. “That’s excellent, Heather!” He could never call her Heathen like the others. He would not label her an infidel, as if it were a joke. He came around and gathered with the others. “I’m in the up-and-comer profiles,” she said. She hadn’t even stopped to take off her jacket. “Look!” She leafed through, murmuring the page number, “thirty-two, thirty-two”, which she had obviously memorized. “Here I am!”

Mohammed was impressed. There she was, holding herself up. He crowded in closer to see. “It’s a regular feature,” Heathen said. “They do a profile every month on four hot prospects.” Indeed, there was a full page for each skier, with a big action photo and one much smaller head shot inset. About two paragraphs of information. Name, age, hometown, how long she’d been at it, future plans, best trick, favourite tunes and websites, craziest day on the slopes, etc.

“This is wonderful,” he said. The other baristas were offering up similar awe and peppering her with questions. Mohammed was as pleased and proud as if it had been his own accomplishment. He liked to see Heathen do well. He went back behind the bar to get some plates. The occasion deserved biscotti to go with the coffee. “Did you see it, Dag?” Mohammed asked.

They’d been gawking at the magazine so long, the coffee was already brewed, and Dag had started to pour cups for everybody. He hadn’t been around the table with the others. “I’ll let those guys get a closer look first,” Dag said. “I can see it from here.”

“You can?” Mohammed said. Heathen was holding it up now. Well, maybe. Even ten feet away, looking at a three-inch airborne figure against a blue sky, one could make out Heathen’s neon orange helmet in the photo. Pointing down, of course, having been caught in mid-trick.

Dag and Mohammed loaded up a tray and brought the coffee and biscotti to the table. Heathen looked up at them. “See, Dag!”

“That’s real cool, Heathen,” Dag said. “Way to go.” He sounded less than completely enthusiastic.

She bubbled over with the details. “Their guy only said it might run, not that it would. I nearly forgot about it till they sent me a copy. I’ve got about ten more in the car. What do you guys think of that picture? Do I look dumb?” Everyone jumped in to reassure her that no, she did not.

Except Dag. He broke in with something smart-alecky. “Heathen,” he said over the chorus of oohing, “of course you look dumb. You’re wearing your ASS-hat.”

“I meant the inset photo, goofus,” she said and swatted him with the magazine. She was clearly in too fine a mood to get pissed at being teased.

Dag took the magazine and looked at it quickly. “That inset looks like a mug shot,” he said. “Did your comb fall out of your pocket when you went off the kicker?”

Heathen was a good sport and laughed at that.

“Can we take this one to put up in here?” Mohammed said. “We’ve never had a celebrity barista before.”

“You mean like on the bulletin board in the locker area?” Heathen said.

“No, I mean out here,” Mohammed waved at the main counter. “Frame it and put it on the wall.”

“Yeah!” Ginette said. “That way all the customers will see it, too! I’ll go to the photo store tomorrow and pick up one of those stand-up holders for it. I pass it on my way in.”

“You guys are too sweet,” Heathen said. “Even my mom’ll probably just throw her copy in a drawer.”

“No, Heathen,” Dag said. “You know damn well she’s going to have a dozen copies on the coffee table in Calgary the next time all your brothers and their families come over for Sunday dinner. But she’ll sure have something to say about your hair.”

That got a laugh all around.

Most of the rest of their meeting was spent rattling away about Heathen’s celebrity status. Instead of learning about the background of the new Rwandan beans, they all asked about the jumps and tricks, because despite living in a ski town, and even though most of them skied to some extent, Mohammed and other staffers didn’t have a real sense of what it took for Heathen to do what she did. The idea that she spent her time doing such exotic things suddenly made her even more exciting.

Heathen got to explain that yes, she went forty feet up in the air, did all those acrobatic twists and somersault combinations. Everybody looked at her in awe. Heathen basked and looked really happy.

Mohammed supposed that Dag already knew about all this sport stuff, since he had done something similar himself. At any rate, Dag was the only one reading the new product cards. Mohammed would just send the cards home with the other baristas. They were trying the coffee, they were having a good time while doing it, they’d make the positive associations and recommend it to the customers. Since BlackArts would sell product regardless, Mohammed let the fan session go on, because it was clearly the most fame any of the rest of the coffee shop crew had brushed up against.

When Tim and Heathen moved outside for a smoke, and the others left, Dag stuck around to clean up.

“You didn’t join in much,” Mohammed said, stacking cups in the dishwasher while Dag wiped the tables they’d sat at. Mohammed always tried to be aware of the interaction between Dag and Heathen. As much as he liked Dag and his wonderful way with customers, he was worried that Dag and Heathen would become an item.

“I already know what layouts and twist 360s are,” Dag said. “I’ve done them on a snowboard. And I know the magazine feature. They have the same thing in Canadian Snowboarder. It’s published by the same people.”

“Did you ever get a profile like that?”

“No.”

“I’ll bet you thought about what you’d put for all those answers,” Mohammed said. “Favourite trick, best party—”

“Yeah, I did,” Dag said, and abruptly changed the subject. “Look, Mohammed, why don’t you just ask her out already? I’m sure she’d go.”

Mohammed shook his head. “I don’t know if we’d click.”

“You’ve been working with her for almost two years,” Dag said. “I watch you guys work a rush, you know exactly what each other is doing, where you’re going to move, you barely have to say a word. You’re already like an old married couple. Me, she gets pissed at me every other day for god knows what reasons. You, you’re never on her nerves.”

“But I don’t have that snow sport connection. You have much more in common with her than I do.”

“Don’t go shoving her off on me,” Dag said. “She makes her own decisions. I know she doesn’t want me, and in case you haven’t noticed, Heathen and I are just buds. I go out with other people.”

Mohammed relaxed at that. He had seen Dag out around town with girls from a couple of the other shops. It was what he’d thought, and hoped. But he still held off telling Dag his main reason for holding back with Heather. His secret fear was that an Iraqi boyfriend would ruin her chance to be on a national team. Some politically-minded type was bound to think “security risk”.

Dag carried on. “Which is why it’s so hard to sit back and not say ‘Hey, can we move it along here?’ when she’s showing off her profile, because that would be all spoilsporty and like tromping all over her moment.”

Mohammed agreed inwardly. That would be bad.

“It’s not Heathen’s fault that I didn’t become a hot national prospect, or even known much around here,” Dag went on. “And, fuck, she is doing well,” he added. “Even though she’s still smoking.” He gave Mohammed a pointed look again. “You could take her out to dinner to celebrate her big celebrity moment. See what happens. And tell her to quit smoking.”

“I think I’ll start with putting the magazine page up,” Mohammed said.

“Yeah,” Dag sighed.

The next day, the page from the magazine had been carefully placed in plastic and stuck out front. Ginette had added a caption she’d printed off her computer at the top: “Heather Dundonald, BlackArts staff star featured in Canadian Freestyler magazine!”

In deference to Dag, though, Mohammed put it on the front of the cash. Facing the customers, not the staff. When he innocently told Heather more people would see it that way, she was extra-pleased.